Month: June 2017
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As I recapped earlier, we were able to run a small 2-race CFR championship at our game gathering, CabinCon. Since we had some new players, we ran a quick demo of the track through the first turn. I showed the rest of players how to crash out in spectacular fashion by pushing my car 60 mph over the top cornering speed and rolling boxcars (12).

With a couple of turns under their belt, everyone was ready to build their cars and start up the actual race.

We bid out for position: Sterling in Red, James in Silver, Jeremy in Yellow, Reese in Blue, me in Green, and Colton in Black in the very back. It probably would have been good to record the driver car layouts but I forgot. I didn’t really build for a “rear strategy” but there I was, looking at the 5th spot.

After the first two turns, I was able to crowd the line with Reese and Jeremy to fight for second place before the first turn.

I then decide to push hard and ditch the line spending as much wear as possible to beat Reese and Jeremy.

I push hard again and cut off Sterling in the lead.

Using my higher speed and better acceleration, I push out ahead of Sterling to take the lead.

The pack tightens up behind us and start battling for 3rd place.

Colton is tired of trying to fall in line behind the 3rd place fighters and pushes hard to skip the optimal line and go toe-to-toe with Reese in the blue car. Sterling sticks with me through the corner.

I decide to push in these corners again and create a gap between Sterling and I. Colton isn’t able to capitalize on his fight with Reese and falls back to deal with James.

Colton drops back to 5th as he loses his fight with James and I maintain my one space gap on Sterling, insuring he can’t draft off me.

I decide to keep my speed up through this little turn and Sterling is able to close the gap while James starts to battle Reese for 3rd.

We make a bad rules call not realize that Sterling could accelerate while in the turn’s last space and it puts him 2 spaces behind me.

I get through the turn easily while James and Reese battle some more and Colton swoops in waiting for someone to make a mistake.

We wrap up the first lap with Reese, Colton, and James in a 3-way spread for 3rd while I maintain my gap on Sterling.

Sterling plays the lead up to the turn slow and Reese decides to push and pass through Sterling. The gamble pays off and he squeezes past Sterling to set up a good start for attacking 2nd place. Colton decides again to ignore the line and pushes to battle for 2nd.

The fight takes it’s toll. Colton pushes hard to gain on Reese, taking 2nd, Reese is forced off his line and Sterling is forced to chance and spins out. I smile as my lead widens.

The racers form up and Colton pushes a little faster than Reese and gains some breathing room. Jeremy starts to battle James for 5th place as he starts to make his move, spending his nice bank of wear tokens.

Reese closes the gap on Colton and the bottom half of the players start to bunch up.

Everyone bogs down slightly in the corner and I push to increase my lead to a comfortable margin.

James isn’t able to take the corner and Sterling and Jeremy push past, knocking James down to the 6th spot.

Coming into the final turns, Colton gets jammed up in a corner as he forgets which card was his current speed and which was the new speed and ends up spending his last wear token in the penultimate corner. Reese still has enough in the tank to capitalize and charge into 2nd place.

I sweep the corner easily and since we fixed the corner rule mistake, Reese is able to accelerate out of his corner while Colton is stuck at his previous speed and loses ground on Reese.

Colton tries to push this corner to take Reese but without a token, he has to dice it. He ends up in a spin with a horribly 20 mph start speed. Jeremy is solidifying his 4th place bid at the time and now eyes a very worried Colton.

The dice Gods are not pleased and Colton tries to push his start speed but ends up jamming gears and goes nowhere. Jeremy pushes the corner and also spins out allowing James to catch up and Sterling to overtake into 4th place. Reese and I easily cross for 2nd and 1st, respectively.

Colton and Jeremy both start back up and are neck and neck but Jeremy is on the faster outside. Sterling breaks away from both for a solid 3rd place and James tries to make a move but also ends up in a spin.

Colton is able to stay with Jeremy all the way through the finish and takes a photo finish 4th place. Monza completes and we have the initial standings.

We decided to make a custom scoring system to keep the points tight race to race:

1st: 3.0 pts

2nd: 2.1 pts

3rd: 2.0 pts

4th: 1.2 pts

5th: 1.1 pt

6th: 1.0 pts

This system kept things from looking bleak between last and first place and allowed for some slight tie-breakers with the fractional points. After Monza, we tackled Nürberg.

In prepping for our CabinCon weekend, I pushed through and painted up a few more minis in case we decided to play a bigger 200 point game.

First up was getting Gordon ready. Here he is with my final block painting. I threw a dark wash on him after to give him a little more depth.

Next, Batfleck joined the ranks. Again, a final wash happened later.

And finally, Pandaman gets a paint up to join my Joker crew. Dark wash came later. I think this is my favorite mini from the Suicide Squad set as I really like the Panda + Assault Rifle juxtaposition. I immediately thought he was a great character to add in the movie and works well in miniature.

We can’t play on a bare table, now can we? So I printed out a bunch of tiles from my Fat Dragon city pack and taped them together in a modern, diagonal setting (something I’ve been seeing more and more of and really like the aesthetic).

For the game, I don’t recall the scenario but in the end, we had to heavily modify so I’m not sure it mattered. We ended up doing another 150 point game so I grabbed the same Joker (Leto) + Eyeball Man and Colton wanted to see Bane in action after he painted him up.

Using out new light-up lamps, we played around with some photo ops before we began the game in earnest. As you can see, I’m leaning heavily on my B/W Walking Dead terrain.

We set up the board with my Joker crew on the left and Bane on the right. Batfleck swoops in to watch. We have objectives in the central area as we realized pretty quick that Bane likely can’t win an objective-based scenario all by himself and the game would quickly devolve into a pretty lame experience. After looking at everything, I’m still a little worried it won’t be a very compelling game with this set up but we push on.

I start out by quickly running to one of Bane’s cash objectives.

Eyeball Man picks it up for one victory point at the end of the round.

Colton decides that Bane will take too long to cross the board on foot and descends into the sewers. This creates a pretty weird game where Bane does nothing first turn, will spend a whole second turn in the sewers, and then finally act in round 3. Joker (Leto) also has a power to remove an opponent’s initiative chip from the round bag, shortening our six round game to five. 40% of the game, Bane will spend in the sewers. We’ll see if it pays off.

Bane’s sewer ploy does create an interesting dilemma where I could go run around and get objectives but that would likely split my forces and Bane could pick me apart. If Bane focuses on Joker, I’d likely lose quickly. I opt instead to force Bane to enter in a way that will force him to engage Eyeball Man. I block the closest Sewer grate with both figures (necessary since Bane is a big model) and have Joker (Leto) on the side with the car blocking any straight attack vectors.

As predicted, Bane enters round 3 on the opposite side with initiative.

But Bane falls just short of being able to engage Eyeball Man directly due to having to spend some counters moving out of the sewer. With so few rounds left, Bane is also Titan Dosing every turn. Luckily, there is a Titan Dose objective of his right near me so he can start earning VPs as well.

I have a pretty good position so I decide to see just how tough Bane is. Eyeball Man unloads three shots into him and hit once. Bane takes a wound. Good thing he has… TEN Endurance. Ugh. Maybe Joker can do better. Nope, Joker misses all three of his shots. Bane has 9 life left and I just unloaded with about the best I could do. Valor was never a villains strong suit anyway so time to switch tactics.

I did have the decision that I could have stood my ground and with a 50/50 chance of getting the next activation, try this whole “shoot the big guy” strategy again but I didn’t want to risk it. I would have needed to hit with all my shots in the next in round in addition to winning initiative and I just didn’t see that happening after going one for six shots earlier.

I end up getting initiative anyway. I stay the course though and leave Eyeball Man as fodder for Bane and move Joker further out of the way.

Bane goes after the easy Eyeball Man target.

Bane inflicts 2 damage on Eyeball Man but doesn’t pull off a pin.

Eyeball Man is only able to use his activation to move further away (he’s been carrying Bane’s Cash objective the whole time so his action are limited).

Bane gets the initiative in the next round and engages Eyeball Man again.

This time, Bane does was Bane does best and smashes Eyeball Man unconscious.

I then have Joker get to my Ammunition objective and end the game 5 VP to 3. We didn’t really think this could go any other way unless Bane could have gotten a hold of Joker and pounded him down. While the game was pretty pedestrian in the results, it was good to see that Bane didn’t just keel over from a hail of gunfire and that having him catch you wasn’t an automatic death sentence.

For future games, we’ll take into account the fact that some of these 150 point demo games likely can’t be used in a real scenario objective game. We’ll probably need to bump up the points to 200 to get a little bit more strategy involved.

At long last, Mantic’s Walking Dead: All Out War kickstarter is complete. My “Wave 2” package arrived the other day in all it’s glory and I’m pretty excited to see what we have in here.

Opening it up and removing the cautionary plastic flotation devices, we find… more boxes! And a floater. Well not really, that’s just Morgan. Loose and roaming free with a packing slip. While booking face I saw that Mantic had a possible issue with the original Morgan sculpt that went into the package so they fixed it and chucked a loose one in the box just in case you get a bad one in the packaging. Who knows, maybe I’ll go all “Ash vs Evil Ash” with the copies.

Loose Morgan will serve as our reference rep for the remainder of this show and tell. Here, he climbs the white boxes of expansions. They are a bit small but there is a lot of love packed into each one of those suckers.

In random opening order, we have the prison expansion Safety Behind Bars on the left, the Greene farm expansion, Miles Behind Us in the center, and the Woodbury expansion, Made To Suffer on the right. While the new minis, cards, and templates are nice, the big draw for me are these rule books. Each adds new scenario content and new core rules to the game.

In Miles Behind Us, we get to see the full campaign rules where, unlike the story mode narrative campaign, you build a core set of survivors for 150 points and run linked scenarios with them. All the while, they will gain experience, items, characters and likely lose some friends along the way. It was the preview of these rules sent out to backers early on that really got me hooked on this game’s potential.

Safety Behind Bars is probably the weakest of the three when it comes to rules as it introduces the cool new “interior” rules for fighting and navigating the confines of buildings and tight spaces. This is really cool but is duplicated in the next expansion and expanded a bit further there. That isn’t to say this expansion is light. It boasts 7 total scenarios and introduces a new class of walker, the armored kind that traipse around in old riot gear. The rules and scenarios also seem the most self-contained as the rules have a lot of detail as to how the Prison map works.

Made To Suffer rounds out the three by expanding the interior rules and city environs as well as adding the iconic Tank to the mix. This expansion also adds an environmental rule with “night.” Having played a bit more of the Batman Miniature Game and knowing Mark Latham had a hand in Knight Models’ ruleset, it isn’t surprising that a similar ruleset is coming to Walking Dead. I think it is fantastic as it is something very iconic to the Batman setting and will work very well in the Walking Dead games. Essentially, the darkness of night will limit line of sight and shooting to 8 inches unless a target is within the killzone of a lamp post. This just further mixes my Batman and Walking Dead scenery together.

Lastly, on Made To Suffer, they expand the rules further to include the running of large games, sometimes epic in scale (over 1000 points). This includes using larger maps or play areas and adding alternate victory conditions with Special Objective cards. These larger games are previewed in our first official two map scenarios detailing the epic Governor attack on the Prison. If I wasn’t such a sucker for a lasting narrative campaign like Miles Behind Us gives us, Made To Suffer would be the best expansion to date.

Alright, enough about the rules, let’s check out some props. Here we have bendy Otis. How is this guy any good at hunting? No wonder he messes up Carl. The bent rifle will be an easy fix and was the only really bent model I noticed in the whole batch.

Hell yeah, Axel. I follow ya.

Badass Rick is Badass. I can’t wait to start using him in earnest. Just a great pose for the star of the series.

Loose Morgan is back now to show us some of the other components like these room templates. The scenery looks a little small for giganto Morgan.

But oddly, the bed is about the right size.

The tank is pretty massive and dwarfs my little black tank I added a while back. That’s ok though as I suspect Mantic will release a kit to build our own tank. They already confirmed they will be doing a kit for the Miles Behind Us expansion:

Maybe a Prison guard tower and Woodbury house/tank kit will come in the future.

That about covers it for my initial opening of the Wave 2 kickstarter material. Very pleased and, honestly, a little sad that this kickstarter is finally closed down. Not too sad, mind you as I have a ton of new content to pour over and new models to paint up. Likely starting with this guy:

Our yearly game gathering, Cabin Con, has come and gone. It was a great time this year and I think we’ve hit our stride as we’ve done this enough times to relax a bit on the planning and still have it work very well. Six of us were there this year and we hit a ton of game over the four and a half days. Below is a quick recap:

The Duke (11 plays) – The Duke was by far the most played game we hit during the weekend. It helps that three of us are avid players.

The Duke

Mystic Vale (3 plays) – We finally got this deck-builder to the table and even though I’ve gotten stomped in every game, there is something seductive about the card crafting you do.

Rattus (1 play) – We first hit this last year and it still proves to be an engaging area-control game.

Santorini (3 plays) – A new abstract game for the group but while it looks amazing, it doesn’t have the strategic pull that The Duke offers. Still a fun time though.

Camel Up (2 plays) – A perennial favorite with our group due to the willingness to push the camels into complete chaos and never let a camel get too far ahead or behind.

7 Wonders (2 plays) – It’s been awhile since we hit this old standby but with 6 players at the cabin, this is a perfect medium weight game that can get everyone involved

Star Wars: Destiny (1 play) – I tried this late at night and with non-starter decks thrown together and the experience was pretty miserable. Maybe the game will be better with beginner decks.

Tiny Epic Galaxies (1 play) – We have a lot of “Tiny Epic” fans so it wasn’t a surprise to see one of these games hit the table.

Road Hog (1 play) – I picked this game up right before the ‘Con and during a lull, we put it out. It went as expected (light, tactical game) but definitely needs more players to be interactive.

Road Hog

Fugitive (1 play) – I only saw the tail end of this game so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Seemed like an asymmetrical deductive game.

One Deck Dungeon (6 plays) – This game saw a lot of hits last year but as a solo game, it was usually pulled out when others were busy doing something else. To my knowledge, no one ever won a game.

Dead Man’s Draw (1 play) – This light card game could have come out a lot more but most of us are pushing variety in gaming during this ‘Con so it’ll have to wait for a different lull in our gaming schedule to see more table time.

Isle of Skye (1 play) – This Carcassonne killer always seems to come out when we have new players. What’s nice is the new player tends to win out. Maybe the veterans just overthink this game.

Wrath of Dragons (1 play) – I was tasked with running this one but totally didn’t prep enough so it ended up pretty botched. Even with the rules mistakes, I was reminded how much I like this game. Now that we’ve gotten a game under our belt as a group, it’ll be good to throw it on the table again.

Wrath of Dragons… sort of.

Valeria: Card Kingdoms (1 play) – This engine building game initially sounded like a better themed Machi Koro but quickly turned into a slog and just seemed to never end. It might have been the weird card combinations that came out but it was sad to see it fall flat after so much potential.

Crokinole (3 plays) – Our top dexterity game got some love this weekend with new players.

Liar’s Dice (1 play) – This Cabin Con darling didn’t get as much love this year but still made an appearance.

X-wing Miniatures Game (1 play) – We decided to break out some X-wing since my friend has kept on collecting even after I stopped. It had been awhile since the last time I played but it came back quickly and has started a renewed interest. I’m sure we’ll see more it hit the table again in the future.

X-wing bombing run

Friday (1 play) – This solo game hit while I was sleeping.

Five Minute Dungeon (2 plays) – Another “while I was sleeping” game. Too many late night miniatures games to meet up with the early risers

Roll for the Galaxy (1 play) – Another hot game from yesteryear and we all agreed that we forgot how much we like this game. Hopefully we’ll see it come out again.

Roll for the Galaxy

Patchwork (1 play) – This game was going on when I pulled out Hnefatafl.

Hnefatafl (1 play) – We tried this ancient abstract game again, this time using more established rules (4 enemies to capture the king, no one can go through the middle or ship spaces, King can’t capture, etc). It went a lot smoother but we’re basically in the infancy of learning this one.

Championship Formula Racing (2 plays) – One of the Cabin Con “premiere” games for this year. We held back-to-back races to crown a Cabin Con Cup winner. Players were discussing the possibility of playing a 3rd game so it must have went over well. Report to follow.

Championship Formula Racing

Mansions of Madness (1 play) – We tried to bust out a game of co-op Descent but we forgot to bring the map tiles so we switched gears and pulled out Mansions instead. I led us to ruin as my strong armed but weak-minded gangster went insane and melted his mind in only a few turns near the end. The game is ok but for all the story-driven content, it’s weird that there is no story for how our random bunch of misfits came together in the first place.

Villages of Valeria (1 play) – I missed this one as well.

Clank! (2 plays) – Another deck builder to hit the table. I think this is my favorite concept of the deck builder genre. The combination of board play and deck building works very well with so many push-your-luck elements.

Kingsburg (1 play) – This game is an old standby of mine. It hasn’t come out in years but it was good to see it again.

Valley of the Kings: Afterlife (1 play) – Another game I missed. It looked like light deck builder.

Jamaica (1 play) – This pirate racing game used be a big hit even among new players but it played pretty middle tier when it hit with the group. It has some oddly restrictive actions so I wonder if that just irked the players a little.

Batman Miniature Game (1 play) – As I wrote about last week, we finished up our LED lampposts and got it to the table. Report to follow.

Batman Miniature Game

Batman Miniature Game

Quadropolis (1 play) – The last game we hit at Cabin Con. It’s a nice little city builder that went down to a tiebreaker victory.

All in all, we hit 32 unique games in 58 total games played over the four and a half day period. Not too bad.

In preparing for last weekend’s CabinCon, I also was able to finish out another languishing project that I initially started as a concept back in March: light up street lamps for the Batman Miniatures Game.

To get these to work, I wanted two things: a small base for the battery and wiring and the ability to turn them on and off. I waited too long to order a simple battery case/switch from Amazon and with only a day left before I had to take off, I needed something quick.

Trolling the aisles at my local Hobby Lobby, I found these small LED flicker tea lights and they looked perfect.

Opening one up, I threw out the cardboard pieces and removed the light assembly and casing top.

Looking at the way they wired and soldered the LED to the base, I found that if I could get the LED off, I could put my lamp wires to this piece and it should work out.

Moving the LED top back and forth a dozen or so times weakened the prongs and eventually the light broke off.

After that, I needed to cut the top off the clear case so that my lamp wires could feed through the top.

A few seconds with a razor saw and the top came off easily. I cleaned the center out with a quick pass with my sword of exact zero and we were ready for some paint.

I covered the inside of the hole so the spray paint didn’t mess with the innards and while this dried, I started working on the lamps themselves.

The biggest issue with these model railroad lamps is the long copper post they have running out the bottom. I pulled the top lamp piece off and fed some extra wire through so that when I trim down the copper post and fed the wire back through, I’d have enough to play with for the final assembly.

Shearing this off with a wire-cutter was pretty simple but pinched the whole shut so I used a sewing pin and some needle-nose pliers to open it back up.

Later I would find that cutting the wires first, inserting the steel sewing pin into the hole and slowly cutting around the copper post was a much cleaner system.

Pulling the wires back through and re-attaching the lamp head finished the lamp post part. The wires themselves are smaller than any wire stripper that I have so I put the sword of exact zero to use again and shaved it down until I could pull the wire casing off.

I drilled holes through the old LED post spots and fed the wires through. I’m not going to lie, feeding these small wires through small holes and trying to bend them around the main spring is an exercise in patience. Tweezers can be very helpful here. I used electrical tape to fashion the stripped wire to the positive section. For these lamps, the black wire is positive.

For the white (negative) wire, I fed it up and carefully wrapped it around the spring. These wires are so thin, they will break instead of bending if you go too far so it may take a try or two. I recommend putting a last piece of electrical tape on the top of the assembly to hold the wires steady and another on the top to fix it to the bottom of the case to keep the pieces together. I didn’t do this the first time and almost ruined the whole thing as the spinning on/off of the lamp also twisted the thin, fragile wires to almost their breaking point.

This process involved only what you saw here but if you know how or have access to a soldering iron, the process is a little simpler and a lot more stable. I had to finish up five more of these and was lucky to have some friends that knew how to solder so we redid the one you see in this write up and quickly soldered the other five I made. As you can see, you don’t necessarily need to solder but the lamp will last longer and will be less finicky.